Alone at the bottom: The Islanders

Kent Wilson, The Nation Network

Tuesday, Aug 13, 2013

In the offseason, every team has hope. Or something. Over the next few weeks, Sporting News and The Nation Network will look at the franchises that, over the past two decades or so, have given their fans the roughest rides. Worst comes first—the New York Islanders.

The great thing about pro sports is that they are endlessly iterative. Even the worst team has the next year, the next draft, the next trade, the next coach or the next general to get it right. The modern NHL is more or less assembled around the ideas of parity and cyclical success; salary caps and inverted draft orders are designed to deter the concentration of talent in just a few markets.

Nevertheless, some organizations seem perpetually unable to dig themselves out of the basement. This occurred to me recently when I stumbled on an old article by Dejan Kovacevic of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette written at from the NHL entry draft in Calgary some 13 years ago. The topic of the article was the history-making pick of Rick DiPietro by the Islanders, who made DiPietro the first-ever goalie to go first overall.

What stuck out to me was this particular passage:

The Islanders, one of the league's doormats for nearly a decade, took the radical step of trading Roberto Luongo and Kevin Weekes, the talented, young goaltenders who split the starting duties this past season.

Emphasis mine.

What’s amazing isn’t how horrible GM Mike Milbury’s DiPietro/Luongo decision is in retrospect. It's that in 2000 the Islanders had already spent about 10 years as a bottom-feeder. That means that for the better part of 20 years, the dwindling faithful on Long Island have endured what can only be considered the league’s most desolate fanship gulag.

Various clubs have had their fair share of fiascos, challenges and disappointments in the modern NHL, but they pale in comparison to the endless drip, drip, drip of failure and incompetence any unimpeachable Islander fan over 20 years old has put up with since the team's run as a powerhouse back in the early 1980s.

The last time New York finished first in its division was 1987. That’s 26 years ago. Terry Simpson was their coach that year. Pat LaFontaine and Bryan Trottier led the club in scoring with 92 and 82 points respectively. Billy Smith and Kelly Hrudey split the season in net. Twenty-five year old Brent Sutter played his sixth season and was already a seasoned veteran.

Since that time, the league has had three lockouts, two different salary caps and innumerable rule changes. Sutter is a grizzled coach who has entered and left the league. Hrudey is a veteran TV analyst while Lafontaine, Smith and Trottier have all long since retired.

In that seemingly endless expanse, the Islanders never again led their division after the regular season—forget the conference. They made the postseason just eight times, never once advancing beyond the conference finals (which they managed to glimpse briefly in 1993). Between 1988 and 2013, the organization’s record is an appalling 733-921-150-92, for a win percentage of 39 percent. To put that number in context, it is roughly in line with the records of the Carolina Hurricanes or Calgary Flames from this past season. So imagine being the 2012-13 Calgary Flames in perpetuity, except in a crappier rink.

Of course, if it’s not just about the lack of on-ice success that makes Islanders fandom the most soul-sucking in the league; it’s the 18 pounds of multi-colored crazy heaped on top of the losing that really twists the salt-encrusted, vinegar-coated knife.

Click that linked article from 2000 again. The litany of Milbury-instituted nonsense contained in that rather brief missive is staggering. Not only did he deal Luongo so he could pick DiPietro (because the latter could handle the puck better and was, like, more of a winner or something), but the move also included Olli Jokinen in exchange for Oleg Kvasha and Mark Parrish. Take a gander at the list of players chosen after DPietro, who spent last season healthy and in the AHL, as well: Dany Heatley, Marian Gaborik and Rusty Klesla went two, three, four respectively. Yeesh.

Milbury’s management was so eye-gougingly poor during his time in the big chair that he stands as the single best objection to those who wield the argument from authority in any hockey debate. You could fill a bathroom reader with his mistakes. Milbury’s top-10 worst moves include:

If you’re keeping score, that’s Chara, Spezza, Bertuzzi, McCabe, Luongo, Jokinen, Muckult, a third-round pick and the chance to select Heatley or Gaborik in exchange for DiPietro, Kvasha, Parrish, post-apex Linden and Yashin. It’s an all-star team traded for an island (pun!) of misfit toys. In the movies, Team No. 2 gets a plucky coach and finds the necessary inspiration to courageously upend everyone’s expectations. In reality, Team No. 2 is the New York Islanders and terrible.

The other problem was Milbury’s habit of doubling down on his bad bets, enabled by the club’s equally eccentric owner Charles Wang. After he was acquired, Yashin was famously inked to an endless contract with many, many zeroes on the end of it. He wound up playing just five of 10 seasons and scoring more than 70 points for the team exactly once. His buyout will be on the books until 2015.

Not satisfied with that blunder, Milbury and Wang inked 25-year old DiPietro to a 15-year deal in 2006, a point at which he had played just 144 NHL games and managed absolutely zero above-average results. So even before DiPietro became an injury case, his contract was a laughably poor gamble. Of course, he was famously liquidated from the roster with a compliance buy-out this summer, an outcome as sad as it was inevitable the day the contract was signed.

On top of all that, Islanders fans had to watch crummy hockey in Nassau Coliseum. It’s a rink so devoid of affectation or charm it inspires online reviews like this:

This place is an uber-poop hole. It is infamously known as the worst professional sporting arena in all of North America. A well deserved moniker.

— The seat cushions are worn out and matted down

— There are not enough bathrooms

— The concourse is narrower than your typical high school venue

— There are seats where the overhang blocks the scoreboard

— There are seats where you must sit at a 45 degree angle if you're over 5'9".

— The food options are terrible.

— The seat cushions are worn out and matted down

— There are not enough bathrooms

— The concourse is narrower than your typical high school venue

— There are seats where the overhang blocks the scoreboard

— There are seats where you must sit at a 45 degree angle if you're over 5'9".

— The food options are terrible.

We could also discuss the hiring and firing of Neil Smith after just 41 days in order to promote Garth Snow from back-up goalie to GM, Wang’s insistence that no one could score on a sumo goalie, the failure of the “lighthouse project” and the club’s perpetually lackluster roster budget, but it’d just be piling on. The take away: It has really, really sucked to be an Islander fan since the late ‘80s, and it has sucked for a variety of different but associated reasons.

The good news for the masochists who still choose to cheer for this outfit is there might be a light at the end of the 26-year-long tunnel. Under Snow, the organization seems to have stopped doing galatically stupid things and has managed to accrue a nice collection of younger talents, including John Tavares, Kyle Okposo, Michael Grabner and Travis Hamonic. The Islanders gave the Pittsburgh Penguins all they could handle in the first round recently and are poised to be, y'know, not an automatic win for their opponents next season, which is something. Oh, and they’re leaving Nassau County for Barclays Center in Brooklyn starting 2015.

So maybe the long, terrible night is over and a new, competitive era can finally dawn for Islander fans. The question is, then, which pained franchise will follow in their stead?

Kent Wilson is editor-in-chief of The Nation Network, a Sporting News partner. Find more of his stuff at FlamesNation.ca and follow him on Twitter @Kent_Wilson.